Its all about mobility!

Mobile-commerce – At the heart of a retailer’s multi-channel strategy!

YOU have heard it before. How smart phones will revolutionize how consumers view the world interact with your business and impact your industry. In the new information economy, networks rule (aren’t social networks a case in point?). Small efforts can deliver big gains. And everything seems to be happening at warp speed. Wasn’t it just yesterday that we first saw and iPhone – and today – Steve Jobs has unveiled the new iPhone 4!

What Jobs will tell you though, is that fundamentals still apply: Knowing which customers you will target, what unique value you will offer, and how you will deliver that value in a way that gives you a competitive edge, one that you can sustain and build upon. What he might not explicitly say is that those strategic fundamentals are far more challenging to define and execute in today's dynamic world.

What works & what doesn’t!

So while – finding feature sets that will prove useful to the mobile customer – is usually not THAT difficult; prioritizing them into a meaningful roadmap – and delivering usable applications that leverage the capabilities of a native device can be difficult.

Functionality offered can vary – if you’re a large retailer with many stores across the globe and a significant online presence or if you’re a boutique fashion retailer – with very few outlets. For the former having a universal store locator, ability to browse and purchase, read customer reviews, browse weekly ads – could be core to a starter app. This can be expanded further to include mobile offers, list-management, proactive alerting, bar-code scanning and/or digital watermark based coupon delivery etc. For the latter, providing a catalog like feel – with images and videos that enhance brand perception would be more suited.

But before a retailer decides what features to build, most of them want to define what being in this space means, how it adds value, and how one can guarantee return on investment (or how much should they invest in this area – to gain the most!).

Mobile Strategy Challenges

The New Economy requires mobile strategy creation under uncertainty. This is the biggest challenge executives face today. The task is tougher for these are uncharted waters: There is little or no historical data to analyze. So, traditional strategic methods do not work well. Institutional and personal legacy systems (Peter Senge, the author of The Fifth Discipline calls them ``mental models'') are perhaps the biggest barriers to strategic change today.

Little do we realize that our ‘mental model’ of how the world works forms the context for decision making. These ``mental models'' are deeply trusted, because they got us where we are today. However, these were formed on the basis of past data, and probably are not a true reflection of the future. So, leading indicators of change, rather than lagging ones, are crucial to strategy.

Ok! So we need to be mobile! Now comes the part when you want everyone on the same page. Should mobile strategy be driven by the .com business or should corporate and brand marketing take the lead? Shouldn’t this really be owned by someone who runs and manages stores – after all most people are looking for instant gratification and might just use their smart-phones to find the closest store or to research a product they have in their hand! But, wait a minute – what about our business customers? And how do we enable consumer loyalty programs or mobile offers without suitable representation at the table? Hey all this is good, but we need to ensure that the technology architecture is right, consumer data secured and will not require significant rewrites of existing systems! Should one have an “evolve-as-you-go” plan or should you “look-before-you-leap”?

Bottom line: It wouldn’t be challenging if it were all that simple right?

To complicate matters, another formidable hurdle to deal with is as yet evolving standards. Multi-device support is crucial. Should one go with a WAP based site or does one have to build individual apps for an iPhone, a Droid & a Blackberry. How does one deal with an open app platform like Android Vs a big-brother-will-tell-me-how Apple iTunes policy? Darn! We’re already late in the game – how do we get a headstart? What if we want to go launch globally – would I be able to support multiple languages?

Conducting an indepth mobile landscape analysis of what other retailers are doing, which technologies are being leveraged the most, and which are the most popular consumer mobile applications out there – can go a long way in helping craft m-commerce strategy. The insight is to substitute traditional methods for innovation, using huge doses of ingenuity in the process. Having something new and engaging will definitely want the consumer to download an app, and play with it often.

One sees opportunities for large retailers to leverage technology being built by quick and nimble mobile upstarts like Expicient Inc (www.expicient.com) that have come up with a SaaS based mobile cloud product for retailers. Other firms that have made inroads in this space are Usablenet and Digby.

Other technology players that specialize in m-commerce and have multiple retailer clients include Unbound Commerce, Vortx and Moonshadow eCommerce Inc. And numerous e-commerce platform vendors have been adding m-commerce components to their offerings; these companies include Sterling Commerce (now IBM), Demandware Inc., GSI Commerce Inc. and MarketLive Inc.

One thing tho is certain that while it might be less than desired, to embark on a journey without a clear idea - perhaps the most serious risk is waiting too long to tread the water. The maxim is: ‘Stay still and you do not learn to swim, you can only drown’.

Strategic imperatives

So what does all this mean for you? CEOs, retail store czars, digital marketing executives of today need to understand that fundamentally, there are three kinds of barriers to ‘mobile strategy’ today. First, the external world is changing too fast to keep up with. There is accelerating change in technologies, channels, (mode, form and delivery of) service offerings, regulation, industry structure and boundaries. Understand that you’re not going to be able to keep pace with it – on your own. In any case mobile development & hosting is not your core competence – sourcing and selling retail products – online, in-store and now on mobile devices is!

Second, it is tough to get the organization on the same ‘page'/. While corporate executives are busy fighting battles about who gets to lead the corporation in the new economy, there are other unfettered unknown entities that are winning the war!

Third, management often tends to keep looking for `the answer’, one based on linear extrapolation of the present. The result is that if management does not get it, they do not fund it.

Leaders today need to realize that strategic thinking in the mobile economy is a process, rather than an event, like those held in plush resorts, and conceived during weekend getaways. Ergo, the need of the hour is directional strategy: That leverages on constant learning and realignment. It is quite like laying a railroad for a train that is already running. You need to mount horses and scout the terrain constantly. Who knows, you might end up joining tracks with someone, instead of building one on your own.

The process is not straightforward. Becoming an efficient mobile-business however does not mean overhauling the bedrock of your business -- changing strategies, organizational structures, technologies, processes, and people. Though, it IS a big job, and you may not have the resources to go it alone.

As in most things, having the right partner here makes all the difference. You need to thoroughly evaluate your choice of partner: Would it be one of traditional consulting firms or smaller mobile-only ‘boutiques’? And if you can find a partner or two – that understand the traditional world of application development in the retail world, and are also well-versed in emerging technologies – you can’t go wrong! The key question to ask is: Do they really cut it in the high-velocity, high-stakes mobile commerce world?

The author is a Managing Partner with Expicient Inc. and can be contacted at darpan.seth@expicient.com.

Sustainable Packaging - Why less is more

If you’re a company looking to green your supply chain and reduce your environmental impact, one area you simply cannot overlook is packaging. Sustainable packaging strategies can be cost neutral or in most cases can reduce cost, considering transportation efficiencies, lower material costs, reduced handling, and waste disposal cost etc. It is definitely a low hanging fruit when it comes to greening your supply chain if you can’t retrofit your entire fleet to hybrid engines just yet. Most importantly, with today’s discerning customer, packaging also says a lot about who you are as a company. If customers have to dig through mountains of packaging paper, bubble wrap, and cut through clamshell casing to get to the actual product, chances are they won’t put your company high in their list of ‘green’ companies. Moreover, if you’re a company trying to sell eco-friendly products, you’re in danger of losing credibility.

Packaging means different things to different people: it’s used in everything from the delivery of raw materials for manufacture and shipment of products to the actual product packaging. At each step there is potential to utilize sustainable packaging principles and minimize waste. To make matters easier, there has recently been an explosion in sustainable packaging materials. Packaging options that are easier on the environment yet match the performance and cost efficiency of virgin material can be found with a little research.

Innovative materials and packaging can make a bold statement, generating intrigue and make the experience (and your company) that much more memorable. One of these options is using recycled materials. Using recycled content in packaging is clearly sustainable – it prevents virgin material from being mined or extracted, and has a much lower carbon footprint since it uses less energy and water in its processing. But it fulfils one other important function – it closes the loop, so that there is a demand for recycling programs and less waste filling up landfills or incinerated.

Recycled Paper – recycled paper can be used in the cardboard, paper board and filler material. In the past, the quality and print-capability of recycled paper board was a concern, but a lot of improvements have been made in recent years making it comparable to virgin paper board. They key metric here is the % of post consumer recycled content. This can range anywhere from 10% to 100% - obviously the higher the % the better, environmentally speaking. Molded pulp packaging has become all the rage for companies wishing to lend a green aura to their products. A few examples of companies using 100% recycled molded pulp packaging are Lexmark, Apple, RIM, Yankee Candle, Aveda, and Kohler.

Recycled Plastic – you may have heard of fleece jackets made of recycled soda bottles, but what about recycling it back into packaging. Considering the enormous numbers of PET soda and water bottles which pour into recycling centers and landfills, it is natural that there are a growing number of packaging products using recycled PET, or rPET. It has the same benefits as any recycled material in terms of material, energy and water savings, plus it is recyclable.

Plant-based plastics – these look just like their fossil-fuel based cousins but are made from corn starch, sugar, tapioca, bagasse etc. Most manufacturers claim their material to be biodegradable and to lower emissions of greenhouse gases compared to regular plastic. Since this a relatively new material, care has to be taken in qualifying these claims. Walmart is using biopolymer from NatureWorks to package fresh produce. Many other companies are beginning to use bioplastics in packaging e.g. Frito Lay Sunchips, Coca-cola, and in products e.g. HP, Ricoh and NEC.

Perhaps the most important sustainable packaging strategy is innovation. The simplest way to green packaging is to use less packaging in the first place. That means designing your processes to increase product to package ratio, consolidating shipments, differentiating between the products (fragile, non-fragile), and using the no more packaging than required to protect the item being packaged.

Today many companies are engaged in an effort to demonstrate their efforts towards environmental sustainability. Sustainable packaging can be a visible way to show that commitment to customers.

NEW M-COMMERCE IPHONE APPLICATIONS

An Expicient review of 2 new applications launched by Sterling Commerce

Smart phones and handhelds are changing the retail landscape by supplementing and replacing ‘traditional’ point-and-click shopping. Internet-enabled mobile handsets, mobile Internet devices, and new wireless broadband standards are all making it easier for consumers to shop online while on the move. Consumers and retailers alike are experiencing a two-way dialogue that is unprecedented in any market, and those retailers that are able to communicate with their customers have begun reaping the benefits.

Traditionally Retailers have not, to date, made significant progress towards moving their retail processes onto mobile applications, and thus have missed significant opportunities to increase revenue and marketing avenues. Many retailers have found it difficult to anticipate the ROI for such investments, especially given the complexity and number of these devices and platforms. But select supply chain software companies have also realized that by moving their fulfillment processes onto these mobile devices, they can provide increased ROI, visibility, and functionality to their Retail Customers. Sterling Commerce, an AT&T company, announced in January, 2010 that it has begun utilizing this new mobile device driven commerce capability, (or M-Commerce) with its new applications:

• Sterling Store Associate Mobile
• Sterling TMS Carrier

These new applications support and extend Sterling Commerce’s Selling and Fulfillment Suite by allowing customers more ubiquitous and real-time access to its core product functionalities such as item availability searches, and carrier updates. Sterling does have two other applications more centered around application optimization and monitoring, which we may review in a later blog.

Sterling Store Associate Mobile

The application provides a sales associate with information on product content and inventory availability from their mobile device.

Key Features:

• Find items faster with quick look-up by ID or partial description
• Assist customers with full item details, pictures and price
• Find item availability at nearby stores
• Zoom in and out of selected stores
• Email a store to hold an item for the customer
• Email customer confirming that the item is available and waiting for them to pick up

Sterling TMS Carrier

The Sterling TMS Carrier Mobile enables transportation carriers to respond to shipment tenders issued by shippers through the Sterling Transportation Management System. This application enables carriers to communicate better and faster with shippers by providing real-time access via their mobile device to shipment tender requests issued by shippers. With this application, carriers can immediately respond to shipment tender requests as well as provide real-time shipment status updates to shippers all from their mobile device.

Key Features:

• Allow carriers to respond to tenders directly from their mobile devices in real-time
• Allow carriers to provide their customers with real-time shipment status updates

The Expicient Point Of View

At Expicient we believe that sales and fulfillment processes can all benefit from the opportunities that mobile devices can offer. The market is growing worldwide for smart phones, and as their prices drop below US $100, barriers to entry are minimal. Some experts believe that developing markets will skip right over the PC revolution, and E-Commerce will be completely skipped over for M-Commerce. Broadband internet speeds and powerful computing in small packages will continue driving the M-Commerce revolution, and those retailers that have the best sales and fulfillment software available, will have significant advantage in this market.

Expicient Inc’s fulfillment software experts have the experience and capability to create top-tier mobile applications for multiple platforms and devices. From intelligent E-Commerce wrapper mobile apps, to apps using a phone user’s location to suggest sales items and provide directions, we have the ability and experience to create relevant, appealing, and highly functional applications for all types of retail needs.

Written By:
James M. Brochu -- Consultant, Expicient Inc. http://www.expicient.com/
Email: james.brochu@expicient.com Consider the Environment, Avoid Printing this Blog

Simplify your mailbox & your life - one catalog at a time!

Every holiday season my mailbox, not to mention every spare table in my house, is littered with shopping catalogs! A lot of them are from retailers that I have never heard of and am sure will never shop at. Luckily, I’m not a compulsive shopper, so I rarely have stuff in those catalogs arriving at my door (and eventually setting up permanent residence in the back of a closet). With the same uneasy feeling that I have when I clean out the refrigerator and throw out all the expensive food, I throw all those glossy catalogs in the recycling bin. Of course, not before giving them the hard-to-resist peek, which takes more time than I care to admit!

Impact
It is not hard to imagine the destructive impact of producing and discarding millions of these catalogs on the environment. Each year 19 billion sales catalogs are mailed in the USA. 98% of catalogs are unused, eliciting no consumer response.

• 53 million trees are used making these catalogs.
• Producing the paper requires energy equivalent to powering 1.4 million homes a year and creates 24 billion pounds of CO2 global warming pollution (equivalent to the emissions of 2 million cars).
• Waste water discharges from this volume of paper – 53 billion gallons of water, enough to fill 81,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

Of course, one might argue that in the world of multi-channel commerce these catalogs are drivers for increased foot traffic in stores or click through’s for online store-fronts. That rationale though is difficult to quantify – and given the significant cost to the environment, clearly a loss making proposition.

Solution
Luckily, there is a way to reduce this waste. Organizations like catalogchoice.org will allow you to opt-out of unwanted catalogs for free, while keeping or adding the ones you want. Retailers too can benefit by lowering their cost of advertising and better targeting their market. Another way that retailers can help the environment, improve their brand image and cut their carbon footprint is to use recycled paper. The catalog industry alone would save an enormous amount of resources if it were to switch to just 10 percent post-consumer recycled content. Annual savings would include: 851,000 tons of wood, 3.8 trillion BTU of total energy, 510,000 tons of CO2 equivalents, 2.1 billion gallons of wastewater, and 221,000 tons of solid waste. Many retailers are making a switch to recycled paper for their catalogs for these reasons. At Expicient, we are dedicated to helping retailers gain from the benefits of a green supply chain. If you are interested in greening your catalog, or learning more, please contact us at: green@expicient.com As for all you eco-savvy consumers, sign up today at Catalogchoice.org and call/write to your favorite catalog retailer to switch to recycled paper. Happy mail sorting!

The author Ms. Surabhi Konkar is a renewable energy & sustainable supply chain consultant with Expicient Inc.

All that energy - bottled up?

What use is all that energy - bottled up?

It might seem odd, that we wail over the gallon price of gasoline. Here in my neighborhood, it was $2.59 a gallon this past weekend. Yikes.

If you're spending $1.49 for a tiny 9-ounce bottle of Evian, that's $21a gallon! It's all put into perspective with gallon prices for Snapple, Pepto-Bismol, and Aquafina, which is just filtered...tap water. The real cost of our beloved plastic water bottles is billed to our environment. For instance, did you know that…

• 8.8 Billion gallons of bottled water were consumed in the U.S. in 2007
• Plastic bags and other plastic garbage thrown into the ocean kill as many as 1 million sea creatures every year.
• There is a garbage patch twice the size of Texas in the North Pacific ocean

We know that it takes energy to make the plastic bottles themselves - most bottles are made from polyethylene terephthalate (PET), which comes from oil. But don't forget the even more energy-intensive process of trucking billions of these water bottles around the country. Some travel as far as 5000 miles from Fiji!

A new study breaks down just how much energy is used at each step of the process. An estimated total 32 million to 54 million barrels of oil equivalent was required to produce the amount of bottled water consumed in the United States in 2007, according to a study, detailed in the January-March issue of the journal Environmental Research Letters. That is enough oil to fuel 3.6 million cars for a year. That amount of energy is 2,000 times more than is required to make tap water, according to the study. For the most part, tap water is completely safe to drink. Additionally, most people already get enough water through the food and beverages they consume throughout the day. Perhaps the bottled water companies have created all this hype about dehydration. What is scary is that even if you recycle your plastic bottle - that energy is sunk cost. Unfortunately, not all of us do - the Container Recycling Institute, 86% of plastic water bottles used in the United States become garbage or litter.

At Expicient being environmentally responsible is part of our mission. We also believe that small efforts – will over time give big results. We are providing reusable stainless steel water bottles to those we can - to help reduce consumption of disposable cups and plastic water bottles. If you’re interested in getting one of these bottles– please write to us gogreen@expicient.com with your Name, a little about you and any other thoughts you’d like to share. And of course, please do not forget to send us your address.

The author Ms. Surabhi Konkar is a renewable energy & sustainable supply chain consultant with Expicient Inc.